Reap the Wind (Cassandra Palmer 7)

“That.” Fred nodded at the door. Where another mass of master vamps had just appeared behind the group of mages. Half of whom suddenly whirled to face them.

“The Circle isn’t the only one who has backup,” Marco told them gently.

The mages still didn’t reply. They didn’t have to. Because their boss had just appeared like a reflection in the windows leading to the balcony.

They were the same ones where the magical news feed had been projected last night, showing the destruction of Agnes’ court. The same ones where I’d seen a dozen tiny body bags being lined up on a rain-drenched street. The same ones Jonas had been facing when he forbade me to go back and try to save them.

My vision started to pulse at the edges.

“I wanted to give you time,” he told me now. “But we are out of it. The war has seen to that. And recent developments have clearly shown that you need guidance—”

“Guidance like you offered Agnes?” I asked hoarsely. It was below the belt—the two of them had been lovers, and her death had hit him hard. But right then, I didn’t care.

No way would he have tried this with her.

No way.

“Agnes was an experienced Pythia,” he told me crisply. “You are not—”

“I seem to be gaining it quickly.”

“Agnes had years of training; you do not—”

“You don’t get to decide when I’m ready for an office you have nothing to do with.”

“And Agnes would have been in our care in the first place, instead of in the clutches of—”

“Agnes would be ashamed of you!”

That last hadn’t come from me. Rhea pushed through the crowd, eyes wild, face flooding with a dark stain. And still carrying a little girl who couldn’t have been more than two.

“You left them to die. You left her!” Rhea thrust out the child in her arms. What the hell someone that young had been doing at court, I had no idea. But right at the moment, she was staring at Jonas out of big brown eyes, confused and afraid, because loud noises had just woken her up, and big people were shouting, and she wasn’t at her home, in her bed.

Because those of us who were supposed to protect her had failed.

“Look at her!” Rhea demanded. “Look at who you would have condemned! Look at who you would have left—”

“That’s enough,” Jonas said sharply.

But Rhea apparently didn’t think so. In the past twenty-four hours, she’d seen her home destroyed, had been almost killed herself, and had been trying to project some sense of normalcy for a probably panicked group of girls. All while surrounded by creatures most people viewed as monsters.

I suddenly thought I understood that chicken better.

But it didn’t look like it had been enough, and now Jonas was being told.

“Look at them all!” Rhea yelled. “You’re sworn to protect us, but you didn’t. You didn’t! You left us to die, and now you dare to come and say we must go with you? For what? The only one to care about us is here!”

“Yes, she cared,” Jonas said, low and vicious, his eyes glittering into mine. “She cared enough to violate the whole purpose of her office, to go back in time, to risk her life—and thereby to endanger all of ours!”

“It was fifteen minutes,” I told him, jolted out of some of my anger by the rising tide of his. Rhea’s little speech seemed to have shaken something loose, and he was looking . . . I didn’t know for sure how he was looking, but I didn’t like it.

“I didn’t change much of anything,” I told him, more quietly. “I got the girls out of the building before it exploded, that’s all. It still went up on schedule; everything else stayed the same. The time line couldn’t have been that—”

“I don’t care about the damned time line!”

“Then what are we talking about?” I asked, honestly confused.

“We are talking about you!”